The night before last, after Quaker Quest, my dreams took an unpleasant turn.

I was applying for a full-time job in a construction warehouse. The hiring agent was telling me all the requirements of the job: 8 am to 8 pm every Friday and Saturday, different shifts assigned by the supervisor on weekdays with no notice. Mandatory overtime. Heavy lifting. Half an hour for lunch. Ask permission to go to the bathroom. Late twice and you're fired. It was like many jobs I'd applied for and held briefly when I was much younger, and it promised to be hell. Even in the dream, I was asking myself, "Why am I doing this?"

In real life, I'm working part-time with benefits and between me and Denise we're just covering our expenses, but we have some flexibility about how we spend our time and volunteer. It's a good arrangement, though it doesn't allow for lots of travel and extravagant entertainment. If both our jobs hold up during the bad economic times, we're MORE THAN OK.

When I woke up, I was making coffee when Denise came down and asked if we could schedule a visit to our daughter in Michigan to see her new house. In the course of an emotional discussion, I told her of my dream, and she immediately recognized that it fit our daughter's situation more closely than ours. Maybe even though she has a full-time job with benefits that looks good in theory, she is suffering just what I dreaded in the dream. Just like my younger self, to paraphrase Dylan, she probably has a "headful of ideas that are driving her insane.." and has to scrub the floor instead.

I don't know why, in good times or bad, Americans put up with this kind of thing.